Virtually Yours

My final paper topic:

Virtually Yours: Desire and Fulfillment in Virtual Worlds

The sex beds of Second Life have become home to acts of virtual desire for couples of all kinds. To outsiders looking in on the community, Second Life seems to have become a home for deviant behavior ranging from "age-play", where one of the partners uses an avatar appearing beneath the age of consent, to sex with Unicorns to produce baby unicorn offspring. These actions occur out of sync with "real world" relationships, and are redefining the question of what constitutes perversion or justifies moral outrage. What are the implications for virtual morality when we leave the mores of "normal society" and try to construct a new morality that understands how real the virtual can be? The philosophical turn to moral particularism gives us a balance for considering moral questions in a virtual space, meaning essentially that we have to take questions like "What is adultery?" and recast them in light of the particular situation these virtual worlds present. Evaluating the implications of such a subculture requires acknowledging that while nothing physical is happening, something real is. Are the sex beds of Second Life becoming the new forum for the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, or are we looking at a new era for Philosophy in the Bedroom?